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Blog Journal 9: Flipped Classrooms and PowerPoint

     A flipped classroom is essentially a class structured so that the learning happens at home and clarification happens in class. I first heard of this instructional design in high school. I only took four Advanced Placement classes in high school, one of them being AP Psychology. In this class, we were provided with video lectures and textbooks. It was our responsibility to do the readings and watch the lectures online as needed so that in class, when our teacher would lecture, we were prepared with questions. Our in class lectures were quite vague and just used to really clarify topics, since psychology is a complex subject. We were always given time in class to do study guides and ask questions. Out of all of my AP courses, I did the best on my AP Psychology exam after using this method. I don't believe, however, that it is the most effective instructional design for all subjects nor students. You also have to think about accessibility. Our video lectures were all online, and if a student did not have access to a computer, they missed out on important information for the class and thus only obtained the information from the superficial lectures in class.
     An OER, or Open Educational Resource, is a resource that reduces the cost of education for students. I never thought about the cost of textbooks until maybe middle school or high school. By this time in my educational career, schools had been getting less and less money. This means that the textbooks we had were all from the early 90s and falling apart. In many of my classes, we weren't allowed to take the books home, either because the school didn't have enough left for every student to take home or because they were falling apart and would definitely be destroyed by the students at home. In classes that were lucky enough to get new textbooks, the students again were not allowed to take them home because no one knew when we would be able to purchase new books and it was essential for us to preserve the books as long as we could. OERs have the same content as textbooks, without the cost. In my senior year of high school, the discussion of Pearson's control of the monopoly on educational texts was prominent, but we really didn't have anything we could do about it. Now that I have learned about OERs, I see that there are so many cost-effective alternatives that schools could and should implement in order to save money and keep the information they teach students up to date. This article I found online offered 16 different OER websites that each offer hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed OERs. You can check out the article and its recommendations here!
     In the past few weeks for my Educational Technology course, we have had two moderately large assignments on PowerPoint. The first was a powerpoint that would be used to teach a class and the second was an interactive powerpoint. For my lecture powerpoint, I decided to teach students how to workshop writing productively and constructively. As a Creative Writing major and video producer, I have had to workshop work for the past 6 years and I figured that sharing the skills that I've learned over the years would be a great powerpoint. I learned how to record a presentation through PowerPoint which was really cool and not something I ever realized was an option. My online course this semester has weekly lectures and I suppose I never thought about how my professor recorded a lecture over his powerpoint until now. For the second powerpoint I decided to create a Jeopardy review game for an elementary Italian language course. I remember playing Jeopardy games in high school but, again, I never really thought about how my teachers made them. Initially, looking at the assignment, I was quite overwhelmed. Having to create something with so many options and links on one page made me think of Netflix's Bandersnatch special where a young coder is making a choose-your-own-story game and essentially loses his mind because of it. After I sat down and actually completed the assignment, however, I found that it was not nearly as complicated as I had expected. Overall I am pretty proud of my projects, but I do wish I spent more time on the aesthetics of the second powerpoint and had a better microphone for the narration of the first.



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